Becoming #1: Beginning Competitive Bodybuilding

If you are going to put a lot of time, effort, and money into training, you might wish to show off the end results in a bodybuilding fitness competition. These contests are held throughout the country and world and showcase some of the most physically fit bodies known to humankind. There are many levels of competition, so don't worry if you aren't Mr. Universe just yet-you can find a competition that is right for you. Any sort of contest does, however, require a dedication to training, including a healthy diet and lots of exercise.

The first thing you should do when you decide to begin competitive bodybuilding is to find a coach. It will be much easier to break into the competition world if you have someone with a little experience under his or her belt guiding you. With your coach, decide on a training schedule and diet, and choose whether or not you want to take supplements. Natural training is, of course, always best, but you may wish to take vitamins or other supplements to make sure your body is getting the nutrients it needs even if you cut some foods out of your diet.

Next, research some of the events held near you. Local events are a good place to start if you live in a big city. If not, you may have to travel some distance to find events, so plan accordingly. Some competitions have an entry fee, and all have different rules of conduct. In most cases, you will have an orientation session the day or morning before the event, but you need to be well prepared before this to avoid looking like a novice in front of the judges. Before the competition, you should not only train, but also learn to flex while you pose and still look relaxed. You may also want to tan, remove hair, and take other measures to help your body look as lean and sculpted as possible. Your coach, if he or she has participated in competitive bodybuilding, should be able to give you advice in these areas.

After the competition, evaluate your performance, good or bad. Nobody is perfect, but by learning from past mistakes, you can do better at future competitions. Keep your eyes peeled in the staging area-what are other competitors doing to help their performance? As soon as the winners are announced and the applause has died, head to the judges' table. They are the experts and can give you a quick verbal assessment of your body and give you advice for your next competition. Be humble and listen to everything they have to say, both positive and negative. In no time, it will be you in the winner's circle, and you can give advice to the new competitive bodybuilders in your area.

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Natural Bodybuilding Tracking Quickly Builds Muscle

Natural bodybuilding precision is a technique that is sure to maximize muscle gain in the shortest possible time. Some natural bodybuilders even see the results of steroid users by paying very close attention to their training precision. If you are a natural bodybuilder, and want huge results, now is the time to start paying attention to the word precision.

In natural bodybuilding, there leaves very little room for training error. Natural training with precision is crucial for significant muscle achievement. Let's face it, a steroid induced bodybuilder is granted a greater margin of error in training, and nutrition. Steroids aid bodybuilders in recovering faster, and can support longer, more intense bodybuilding training sessions. This enables bodybuilders the liberty to train and eat with less precision, and still reap fantastic muscle development. However, natural bodybuilding athletes must pay very close attention to detail in order to benefit from great muscle building results. Witnessing excellent bodybuilding results can be the difference between performing too many training sets, and not enough intensity.

You most likely ask how you can determine if your natural bodybuilding routine is precisely what it should be in order to achieve massive, steroid-free results. Are you working out with the precise amount of training sets per body part? How about the reps, or rest days between workouts? Is your training intensity significant enough to illicit a natural bodybuilding response?

There is an easy way to find out! If you learn only one thing from this natural bodybuilding article, please let this next tip be it. To determine if your training program is the most effective natural bodybuilding routine, pay close attention to detail by recording, and tracking your bodybuilding workouts.

Being a drug free bodybuilder, and knowing what your numbers are at all times, is being an intelligent bodybuilder. Can you imagine not tracking your checking account balance? What a silly question! Not closely tracking your bodybuilding progress is considered just as silly. Besides overtraining, lack of tracking your progress is the biggest mistake fellow bodybuilders are making.

How can you train with maximum effort and efficiency to improve your musculature if you don't know really where your numbers are? Remember, developing natural muscle is much more challenging, but a sense of precision is gained when you track your progress. Without bodybuilding workout precision, it is like driving a car in a strange place blindfolded.

The results of tracking can assist your natural bodybuilding efforts by making the whole story visible. Tracking will help determine if the amount of rest days between workouts are optimal or not. If your strength is improving with each and every workout, you are getting the precise amount of rest needed for optimal growth. If it is not, your rest days are not optimal. Therefore, tracking can direct your muscle building workouts into a precise science.

As soon as your natural bodybuilding log reveals a few training sessions that show no gains or decreasing strength, you are most certainly overtraining. Training more than is necessary is the worst enemy for any natural bodybuilder. Just remember, your body won't be able to recover from the training stress as rapidly as a steroid induced bodybuilder can. Therefore, if you try to duplicate a steroid aided training program, you will be dead in the water. Your natural muscle building results will definitely suffer. Once again, focusing on a specific program for you, and you only, is a key point to remember. Consider your training log the key to all the information necessary for significant natural bodybuilding gains.

Take a closer look at your training log. If you find you have achieved 10 reps on a particular exercise for two consecutive workouts, you should focus your mind on pumping out the eleventh reps during the next training session. This specific data, if followed, will direct and focus your natural bodybuilding routine into precisely what is necessary for growth.

This valuable data can also serve as a great motivator for achieving your specific goals. I call it training smart. If you know precisely what numbers are needed to accomplish your goal during the next workout, you are more likely to achieve it, thus, overloading your system in order to develop rock hard muscle. Take, for instance, a retail store. If they don't track how much money they made yesterday, how will they stay focused on what they need to beat today?

Prior to entering the gym, successful natural bodybuilders make point of drawing up a mental image of what needs to be accomplished in order to achieve their goal. By keeping a natural bodybuilding training log, you too will have a license to quickly build muscle.

Another excellent tip to achieving natural bodybuilding results is paying attention to the timing of your nutrients. Once again, it is critical for a natural bodybuilder to pay close attention to what is happening on the nutrition side of the natural bodybuilding puzzle. Research suggests it is important to eat carbs, and protein within one hour following a hi-intensity, natural bodybuilding workout. This particular bodybuilding nutrition regimen will help stimulate the muscle building recovery process. Natural bodybuilding buffs also need to pay close attention to the amount of calories they are taking in. Just as training, I also recommend tracking your nutrition regimen.

As you now know, natural bodybuilding results are easily seen if you focus on precise training. By training smart you will reap all the benefits of bodybuilding without steroid side effects. Simply follow my recommendations stated above, and your training will be guaranteed to be the most effective, efficient natural bodybuilding system possible.

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Copyright (c) - Wellness Word, LLC

Jim O'Connor
Exercise Physiologist / The Fitness Promoter
9461 Charleville Blvd. #312
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Jim O'Connor is passionate about promoting natural bodybuilding. He feels steroids are not necessary if training in the most effective manner possible. Visit Natural Bodybuilding Info.com to learn more natural bodybuilding tricks, tips, and secrets.

Bodybuilding - A Secret Template for Life Success

?In the foundation of every building or house that I have built, I have a barbell plate?

These are the words of the late Ray ?Thunder? Stern , a legend in professional wrestling, bodybuilding, and entrepreneurial success.(1) In fact, dare I say; in a world inundated with advice on how to be successful, nothing compares to the now out-of-print book Power of Thunder, co-written by Mr. Stern and Robert Wolff, Ph.D. In it, Ray Stern highlighted and explained his principles for success in such a manner that ?authentic and effectual? are the most forthcoming words of distinction when comparing it to the countless books on the self-help shelves today.

And yes, the symbolic ritual within the context of edifice development was explained. Mr. Stern, a real estate investor and pioneer of the fitness industry, cemented a big barbell plate in the foundation of the buildings and homes he developed. ?I do this as a testament that anything and everything I have in life, I owe to bodybuilding?, wrote Mr. Stern.(2)

But what is it about fitness and bodybuilding that can provide such a template for life success? How can the ability to make positive and lasting changes to your physique translate to practical lessons of wisdom in goal setting and achievement?

Regardless of one?s personal aspirations or definition of success, physique improvement can provide a microcosmic blueprint for bringing dreams into reality. It does so with such eerie precision as to even warn us of the pitfalls of attempted shortcuts. Example: who among us long-term bodybuilding enthusiasts hasn?t witnessed the neophyte muscle-builder who thinks steroids are the key to physique improvement? The fleeting benefits and oft-resulting dependence on such drugs can have detrimental long-term outcomes on even the appearance of one?s physique. Expanding this observation out to context, it seems reminiscent of a life success principle from the words of Ray Stern: ?Being great in whatever you do takes time. Short-term gain always equals long-term pain and don?t let anyone tell you differently.?(3)

Goals: The First Page in Your Success Blueprint

In order to achieve anything worthwhile, we must have a vivid internal representation of what we want. A vague idea will not generate optimal results. If we drift through life with day-to-day thoughts such as ?I?d like to be more muscular? or ?I want to lose some body fat?, our odds of identifying a strategy for accomplishment and our resolve to carry it out will fade as fast as the ambiguous images in our minds. Conversely, when our goals are specific; ?I want eight percent body fat; I want seventeen inch biceps; I want a fifteen inch ratio between my torso measurement and my waistline, our chances of making these things a reality goes up exponentially.

This practice can then be carried over to other contexts of your life. In fact, when you get good at setting specific goals for your body, this skill will likely be etched into your subconscious mind for effective retrieval when you need it elsewhere?career, health, relationships, etc.

A Powerful Strategy: The bulk of Your Blueprint

Nothing will extinguish motivation to achieve a goal faster than an ineffective strategy with no clue as to where to find or how to develop an effective one. In the gym, it usually happens like this: The beginner reads that he or she should work the biceps once per week. The generic routine this individual is given recommends doing some well-rounded selection of exercises for a reasonable number of sets of six to ten reps. It encourages this person to increase exercise weight when possible and to work out with ?intensity? (with no real definition of this fuzzy term). Oh, and let?s not forget good form; it?s to be used on all biceps exercises.

But what?s wrong with this picture? Well, nothing for the first few weeks. But all it takes is a slight, undetectable negative variable to throw the unsuspecting natural trainer into the clutches of a progress plateau. Maybe his or her set numbers are just slightly too high for the number of rest days provided ? a factor not only tied to individual genetics, but variables in weekly sleep patterns and stress levels as well. Another possibility: a reaction to unsatisfying progress leads the trainee to inadvertently train harder with the plateau having been brought on by inadequate recuperation. When this becomes perpetual, it?s a recipe for motivation-sapping frustration.

The solution to this is to develop what I call a powerful strategy, not just an effective one. A strategy becomes powerful in its effectiveness when it?s designed in such a way as to provide flexibility and micro-feedback. Flexibility means the structure of your workout and recovery system lends itself to small adjustments that can make a big difference. Micro-feedback means it?s structured in such a way that you can easily see from one workout to the next whether you?re on track to your goals. The feedback is a tool applied to the building blocks of flexibility. Any workout in which this feedback isn?t observed and responded to is a waste of time. Well, only if you?re a person who likes to enjoy rewarding results as opposed to going through motions.

How important is flexibility and attention to feedback in establishing an effective strategy to achieve our goals? Let?s look at the words of Ray Stern in Power of Thunder: ?The real winners in business, bodybuilding, sports or whatever, are those who have a big dream or goal, yet have many plans that they can use in order to achieve it.?(4)

Visualization: Your Homing Device

The legendary Arnold Schwarzenegger said he visualized his biceps being giant mountains on his arms. Ray Stern wrote ?Think, think, think about your goals and dreams and never stop believing??(5)

Visualization, practiced and utilized for physique improvement, is a skill of achievement that can be transferred to any area of life you?d like to improve. Even better, it becomes easy-to-use and a more effective tool the more it?s practiced. Better still, when we visualize a goal and accompany that internal representation with positive emotion and excitement, our chances of reaching it go up dramatically. All this really requires is a few minutes of quiet time each day. When a window of time is used regularly to play your goals out in your mind, the subconscious will work out many of the details, even while you?re sleeping. That?s why this tool acts as a homing device in guiding us toward what we want.

So what specifically should you visualize and emotionalize? The very last step that will tell you your goal has been accomplished. If it?s gaining ten pounds of muscle, see yourself standing in front of the mirror and on the bathroom scale with those contoured slabs of meat on your frame. If it?s losing twenty pounds of unwanted fat, visualize the new and leaner you in the mirror. Maybe it?s a job promotion; see your boss sitting you down in his or her office and telling you of your advancement as you feel the positive charge of emotion that this will elicit from you.

Bodybuilding and Fitness: The Ultimate Success Practice Ground

Bodybuilding, along with any type of physique improvement, represents the rawest form of merging the world of your desires with the power to make them happen. It?s just you, your body, and some equipment. The results you get depend upon how well you utilize your mind and an outer strategy to mold something better than what you started with. If you really ?get it? ? really hone in on the formula for success within this elementally pristine context ? you can ingrain the ?success mindset? into your physiology.

When I sadly learned that Ray ?Thunder? Stern passed away in March, 2007, I saw a quote by his wife, former fitness model Debi Lee, that seemed poignantly revealing: ?? He was a very unusual man with visions and the energy and know-how to make things happen?(6)

Judging by words in his book, these are attributes that he would likely credit to his passion for bodybuilding. They are characteristics not elusive to the rest of us, should we be as observant and receptive as Ray Stern to the inherent wisdom and powerful lessons that bodybuilding can offer us.

(1) Stern, Ray. Wolff, Robert. Power of Thunder Wolff Creative Group, Calabasas, CA. 1994 (Page 126) (2) Stern, page 126 (3) Stern, page 84 (4) Stern, page 109 (5) Stern, page 64 (6) Oliver, Greg. Ray ?Thunder? Stern dead at 74 Slam Wrestling, March 2007(Paragraph 21)

Scott Abbett is the author of HardBody Success: 28 Principles to Create Your Ultimate Body and Shape Your Mind for Incredible Success.

Scott is a certified fitness trainer and a certified Master Practitioner and Trainer of NLP. You can view his own phyical transformation by visiting http://www.hardbodysuccess.com